Osirak and the Counter-Proliferation Puzzle

This article focuses on the efforts made by Israel to stymie Iraq's nuclear program from 1974 to 1981. It argues that to fully understand the effects of Israel's campaign, its nonmilitary components need to be addressed, rather than focusing chiefly on the 1981 bombing of the Osirak reactor. While existing views hold that the bombing was counterproductive, this study finds Israel's overall campaign to have been a sophisticated and effective effort at curtailing Saddam Hussein's program. The campaign's main achievement was in buying time that allowed external events to take place, building towards the eventual collapse of Saddam's nuclear program. While Israel's campaign demonstrates that counterproliferation can work, there are instances where it can be highly counterproductive. Buying time can also be achieved without the use of force, through coercive means, as demonstrated by the Iranian case over the previous decade. However, various gradations of military intervention remain an important tool for preventing nuclear proliferation, as demonstrated by the cases of Osirak and the 2007 destruction of the Syrian nuclear reactor in al-Kibar.     

Nicki-aesthetics: the camp performance of Nicki Minaj

In this essay, the author contends that Nicki Minaj practices what he terms nicki-aesthetics, a form of black performance art that employs an extravagant theatricality and a vivid, intensely hued style. Nicki-aesthetics shares qualities with the sensibility of camp, as outlined in Susan Sontag's 1964 article “Notes on ‘Camp,’” yet challenges camp's assumed association with white gay men as well as its reduction of women to objects (rather than subjects) within the camp universe. Nicki-aesthetics realigns blackness and camp as mutually constitutive (rather than oppositional) forms, while reconfiguring camp as a black female-centered practice. In addition, Nicki Minaj demonstrates her dexterity at performing nicki-aesthetics in an offbeat interview on Elle magazine's website while deploying avatars to play multiple roles. In doing so, nicki-aesthetics' quirky blend of artifice and alterity ultimately rebukes hip-hop's obsession with authenticity.     

Too Much, Too Late: The Advocacy Act in Ontario

This paper examines the concept of government‐based social advocacy on behalf of vulnerable people in the community. It uses as a case example the Ontario Advocacy Act, a statute that was surrounded by controversy through its short life. The more general question raised is whether the ideas of government‐based advocacy are fundamentally conceptually untenable, or whether the fault lay with the specifics of the act and its implementation. As governments globally cut back on social supports for vulnerable people, the need for advocacy and support are self‐evident. This paper explores the broader viability of this one, specific type of response.     

Redistributing the energy tax burden in the Philippines

This paper uses an aggregate modelling approach to assess the impacts of a redistribution of the taxes and duties that currently exist on crude oil and refined petroleum products on the Philippine economy. The approach used in the analysis consists of a general equilibrium model composed of fourteen producing sectors, fifteen consuming sectors, three household categories classified by income and a government. The effects of replacing the taxes and duties on crude oil and refined petroleum products with a more broad based tax on manufacturing and service sectors output on prices and quantities are examined. The results are revealing. For example, the consequences of redistributing the tax burden away from petroleum products to the manufacturing and service sectors of the Philippine economy will be an increase in output by all producing sectors of about 3.5 percent or about 2.4 hundred billion Philippine pesos, a rise in the consumption of goods and services by about 6.1 percent or 1.6 hundred billion Philippine pesos, a rise in total utility by 6.9 or 1.9 hundred billion Philippine pesos, and virtually no change in tax revenue for the government. When subjected to a sensitivity analysis, the results are reasonably robust with regard to the assumption of the values of the substitution elasticities. That is, while the model's equilibrium values do vary in response to different assumptions of the values of these elasticities, the fluctuations are not so enormous to suggest that the model is unrealistically sensitive to these parameters.     

Pearl Harbor and Midway: the decisive influence of two men on the outcomes

Beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor, the war in the Pacific was a largely losing campaign for the Americans until the Battle of Midway, on 4–5 June 1942. The American ability to predict this Japanese attack the second time around served as the turning point for the war in the Pacific. And the story of how the Americans turned a catastrophic failure into an impressive cryptological achievement involved the story of one man, Joe Rochefort, convincing another man, Admiral Chester Nimitz who commanded the Pacific Fleet, that he could trust his analysis of the intelligence he compiled and analyzed.